What’s it all about then: collecting contemporary international art at Art Gallery of NSW Sydney 1984-2013 and Bath University UK 2013

• The Horton Bequest specified that the income be used to collect non-Australian contemporary art. The Gallery consequently included contemporary galleries on level 2 in the extensions that were opened in 1989. • AGNSW had not previously collected international contemporary so it was necessary to develop a policy or at least a philosophy. • Neither funds nor space permitted a comprehensive representation of art movements or individuals. The collection would start from 1984 rather than attempting a contemporary history from the 1960s nor Avant Garde precursors of the early Twentieth Century. This remains the most serious gap in the collection today. • A framework would be needed to narrow the field and to allow for coherence in both display and interpretation which is essential for a collection to function in the gallery. Identifying ‘the best’ simply would not work without the ‘best of what’ being clarified. • One focus could have been geographical but in the days of global or international avant garde practice this makes very little sense. The frame would have to capture a significant international tendency based on artists’ practice wherever they were working. • The collection should explore key ideas in the recent history of art. The single most important figure in this history would be Marcel Duchamp.

The contemporary collection at AGNSW from 1984

• The collection represents a view of what art today can do and why it really matters. • The basic premise is that there is an existential divide between consciousness and matter and that art straddles this boundary. This is particularly powerful when objects come to embody ideas. While this line of argument predates the arrival of internet it provides a platform from which such new technologies have been able to spin off. • We can know about the material world but there is a sense in which being with and of the material world can be wished for but is hard to win outside of meditation. Art does enter this between state, a different kind of knowing.

Many major exhibitions and Biennales since the 1960s worked with certain assumptions about art after Duchamp but this has not been well communicated to the public and is little understood even by many art historians. Harald Szeemann was one of the first curators to start mapping the territory through exhibitions such as ‘Live in your head: When attitudes become form’ 1969. It was a landmark exhibition and as the title suggests it investigated the relationship of mind and matter in art. Over the coming decades Szeemann and many other curators continued to ‘show’ these ideas as exhibitions but not necessarily to ‘tell’ what the underlying concepts were that they explored. Szeeman’s exhibition is currently living again as a fairly faithful reconstruction of the 1969 original at Prada Foundation Venice assembled by Germano Celant. The problem with Duchamp as a signpost is that he deliberately wore many hats. One was as a provocateur who found the pretensions of the art market hilarious and never hesitated to send it up. Historians have focussed on his critique of the market overlooking his prodigious investigations of systems of representation including the occult. His objects certainly challenge the very idea of representation and yet simultaneously they provoke a rich tapestry of associations. His unbelievably creative intelligence and sense of humour has opened up vast possibilities for artists in the twentieth century and continues to do so in the present. He was always playfully experimental and built a reputation with very few artworks but came up with some enormously fresh and important ideas.

Marcel Duchamp The bride stripped bare by her bachelor’s, even, The Large Glass 1915-1923

The legacy of Marcel Duchamp

• In 1915 Marcel Duchamp affirmed that material in art need not be an arbitrary means of creating an image of something external to itself. On the contrary the medium can literally be part of the message. • When Duchamp made the sieves for the Bachelors’ domain instead of painting them he allowed dust to settle on the glass through a mask and later fixed it. Sieves are about collecting particles from a matrix and it takes time so the process of accumulating dust corresponds perfectly with the meaning of the objects portrayed. • This idea of Duchamp’s could be summarised as employing an ‘ontological communion’ between signifier and signified. In other words a thing could be represented by a trace of itself or by a part that signified the whole or just by a material affiliation with the thing. It was to liberate art from the limitation of pictorial illustration for coming generations while reintroducing the possibility of referencing sensory experience of the world denied by abstraction. • Duchamp was also interested in arcane systems such as alchemy, cabala, numerology. These systems fascinated him for their complexity but he also saw how they could provide templates for introducing and ordering chance in art. • The importance of chance was to be critical in the avant garde for example for John Cage and Samuel Beckett as well as for minimalism and including systems and process art in the 1960s and 1970s. Chance and systems are a way to avoid self expression by an artist and make the encounter of a viewer and an object the site of expression. Francis Bacon was very aware of this and played it for all it was worth

Key works from the British Show 1985

At the same time as I was working through the implications of such a policy I was also curating an exhibition of new British art that toured Australia and NZ in 1985.

Some of the artists I worked with in that exhibition fed into the concepts that would subsequently guide the formation of the collection: These included the place of art in mediating mind and matter, metaphors of the horizon and the void. ‘ontological communion’, metonymy (where a fragment or trace of an object might stand for the whole) and objects that precipitate embodied memory. Subsequent exhibitions I curated also fed into this developing model for looking at art. For example Boundary Rider, Body, Trace, Self Portraits, Kiefer, and even Bacon.

Antony Gormley – Work 1984

These lead figures were made by covering a cast of his own body they take the form of traces like cicada shells hence Stephen Bann suggests they are not images of him but traces or in ‘ontological communion’ with his absent body.

Antony Gormley - A Field for the Art Gallery of New South Wales 1989 The first of his fields series.

These figures configured in the shape of the brain suggest consciousness arising from the earth. This idea about mind and matter in art came to be central to my thinking about the collection and art in general.

Gormley at Mootwingie Courbet L’Origine du monde Gormley Field for great Australian desert

Antony Gormley at Mootwingie discovering the source of the Mootwingee creek or L’origine du monde, another kind of metaphorical threshold to the void or event horizon the meeting of being and not being ie the point of becoming where life bringing water bubbles up from the rock.

Antony Gormley A room for the great Australian desert 1989 AGNSW. While installing A room.. and collecting red dirt to make Field for AGNSW, Gormley talked about Heidegger and the horizon that marks the limits of perception and metaphorically separates consciousness and materiality. In this place when you stand up you are the highest point this side of the horizon. It is a vertiginous experience of being between heaven and earth yet not wholly of either.

Anish Kapoor encounters a wild void. Void Field Blackness from her womb.

In 1989 I returned to the same area with Anish Kapoor where we encountered a naturally occurring, void that had been deliberately worked on by Indigenous people 20,000 years ago suggesting a womb. The void and the horizon share the symbolism of the limit of human perception or consciousness where it ‘touches’ the material plane. The void has Gnostic connotations and in this case it suggests a potentiality such as that which produced the big bang rather than an absence.

Bob Law Blue black Indigo Black 1977

Also in the British Show Bob Law has referenced the void or ‘space for zen mediation’ This work functions optically like a window onto the infinite. There are 12 layers of paint under this black each seamlessly laid down, dried for three days and over painted to create this visual effect of infinity. It takes a few moments looking before the layers of blue and indigo within the field appear creating this sensation of deep space.

Steve Willats ‘Pat Purdy and the glue sniffer’s camp’ 1981.

Here the boundary between the urban planner’s determined housing estate and the anarchic waste land colonised by the youth of the estate was marked by a cyclone wire fence. Objects found by a hole in the fence have been attached to the image. This glue can for example changes its function and meaning when it passes through the fence. From the culture of stable attachment it becomes a source of ritual dysfunction.

Here the fence functions as a veil or horizon between control and chaos / consciousness and unconsciousness.

Tony Cragg - Spirogyra 1992

Spirogyra captures the idea of dna assembling random (molecules) bottles into a partially determined structure. Again it juxtaposes chaos and order. It is also a visual reference to Duchamp and his readymade Egoutoire or bottle rack

Tony Cragg tells a very poignant story about taking a pencil and paper and trying to draw or for that matter write something. He describes making and erasing marks or words to get closer to the meaning of the subject. He then describes re reading the page and discovering that you have drawn or written something that you did not know you knew. Clearly the pencil did not know it however the interaction between the artist and the materials allowed an idea to take shape that could not otherwise have been given form. I suggest that this is something most artists know but it is also something that feeds into Harald Szeeman’s ‘When attitudes become form’.

Joseph Beuys Explaining Manressa 1965 pictures to a dead hare 1966

The impact of the British Show was prefigured for me by the experience of attending a performance by in 1970 that left an indelible impression. After Duchamp, Beuys was the most important artist to develop the principle of found material as signifier and the principle of ‘ontological communion’.

A selection from the collection at AGNSW to demonstrate these themes follows

The following works are drawn from the Collection of about a thousand objects of contemporary art collected in this period. I have concentrated on International works but included a few Significant Australian works from the collection that pick up similar themes and artistic strategies. The first marker for this collection was to be Anselm Kiefer, an exemplary follower of Joseph Beuys with a profound knowledge of Arcane systems and more in common with Duchamp than he at First acknowledged.

Anselm Kiefer Glaube Hoffnung Liebe 1984 Duchamp The large Glass

This panel Glaube Hoffnung Liebe was originally the bottom half of a vertical diptych. In the top panel three windows in the sky suggested Duchamp’s lingering veils above the horizon in ‘The large glass’. When Anselm removed the top panel he added the propeller, a sign for Dionysian transcendence. Transcending the material plane is a persistent theme of dreams but here the instrument of transcendence is made of lead so its doomed to fail. Lead is also the alchemical sign for Saturn the earth bound god (Renaissance melancholia).

Failed Transcendence

• It transpired that the impossibility of achieving transcendence in art was a significant sub plot.

• In an essay about Jackson Pollock ‘Les drippings’ the American writer Peter Scheldahl made a list of things Pollock did not do. One of these headings was transcendence.

• “The idealism of psycho-spiritual lift off is, in its many forms, the fountainhead of endless modern cant. It embodies a desire that is real enough, a desire that Pollock plainly shared. But he never claimed that any such thing is made actual in his work. It isn’t and it isn’t in any work of art. What is actual in Pollock’s best work is the closest, fiercest, most honest asking: asking for transcendence, asking why transcendence cannot be. The silence of Pollock is a silence of listening down into the self, out into history, everywhere. There isn’t an answer. But there is the listening”.

• I would suggest that this applies perfectly to Kiefer’s constant probing of the same question.

Von den Verlorenen gerührt, die der Glaube nicht trug, erwachen die Trommeln im Fluss 2004. (Another broken Opportunity for transcendence a broken stairway to heaven).

The title is a quote from the Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann that describes being on a bridge over a river suspended between the stars and the black water below. Between heaven and earth.

Yves Klein Portrait of Claude Pascale Leap 1960

Klein famously imagined the void and the possibility of transcending the material plane. He studied Rosicrucianism to achieve this end and was also a 4th dan black belt in Judo. He enacted the leap into the void to demonstrate this transcendence but published two versions of the image that created doubts about the authenticity of the action. This was typical of Klein who made great claims and often laid a trail that seemed to undercut the claim.

Ken Unsworth Five secular settings Stelarc Suspension piece 1984 for as ritual 1975

Both Unsworth and Stelarc are Australians who have done performances that deal with suspension or a kind of levitation in defiance of gravity and normal bodily limits.

Ken Unsworth Rapture 1994 Suspended stone circle II 1988

The theme of suspension continues into Unsworth’s sculpture and the stuffed piano also picks up the theme of failed transcendence echoing Beuys’ wrapped pianos and violins that suggest the transcendental aspect of music but mute it.

Meditation on the infinite with/out irony

• Meditation explores just the territory of consciousness we have been talking about but not as a critical conceptual process.

• Imagining the void as a portal onto the infinite in Law,

• Counting down the moments in his life by Opalka

• and a Sufi meditation by Houshiary are contemplations on the infinite that can and do move the close observer. It just takes a little time and attention

Roman Opalka, Shirazeh Houshiary, Bob Law

Opalka 1965/1-00

Roman Opalka began counting in the 1960s using a fine brush and painting white on grey as the paint dried on the brush it got fainter and faionter then he dipped it in again and continued the line. This gave the surface a rhythm of light to dark. Over the years he made the grey lighter so that by the time he died it was almost white on white.

Houshiary Unknowing 2002

This panel is hard to read at first even in the presence of the work itself from a distance it seems to be a white canvas but at closer quarters we can see a vibrant field that leads the eye towards a glow on the horizon. She had prepared the canvas with over 20 coats of gesso each layer rubbed back till she achieved an immaculate eggshell finish. Then she laid it on the ground and placed a plank across so that she could kneel over it and inscribe the Arabic alif a simple vertical stroke of pencil graphite again and again till the surface was covered in millions of prayers. This is also the name of god the first and only one.

Bob Law’s blue black indigo black is impossible to reproduce at first sight it is a black square but if you stand in front of it for about 30 seconds you start to see veils of blue and indigo behind the black. It creates a deep space or void. To achieve this Law painted 12 or more very wet layers of paint onto unprimed white canvas so that it soaked in evenly. Between each coat he would allow 3 days of drying time. This was necessary to avoid the next coat snagging on the layer below and causing a mark that would destroy the illusion of the void. There was nothing to be done when this happened as it often did but to destroy the canvas and start again.

All three of these artists took a very long time to make the works as a kind of meditation. It also take a little time for us to unpack the works visually.

Tatsuo Miyajima Region No 126701 – 127000 1991

Using the technology of conceptual art Miyajima evokes Buddhist principles. These numbers arranged in banks as units, families, tribes and nations constantly feedback to each other creating a virtually infinite number of combinations. These numbers never pass through zero they describe a continuous loop, counting down cosmic events. While some parts might be racing others tick over more slowly thereby suggesting the parallel time streams we all navigate in our subjective worlds. Once again it is a work that encourages us to pay attention to the condition of our being in the world

A Language of objects and materials that trigger episodic or bodily memory

Christian Boltanski - installation view of Toys, Dog in the street, Bathtime, and Children playing all 1991

Boltanski plays upon the ambiguity of photography and memory by (re)presenting these found photographs from old family albums or archives. Art that presents objects as a trace of people and places has an affective power that works through the subjectivity of each viewer and yet it invokes feelings of loss that are common to all. Black and white photos have something of the material trace of the thing this is amplified by Boltanski by creating these images in the form of ex-votos.

Richard Serra Plate Pole Prop 1968-1983

Minimalism such as this plays out on the senses or through the body making the viewer an active participant. That is to say affect is transferred through the object onto the nervous system of the beholder.

Vic Muniz Richard Serra, Prop, 1968... (Picture of Dust) 2000

Muniz found an archival photo of this Serra as it was installed for the first time in the Whitney in 1968. He went to the original site and collected dust that he then scattered on a light box and arranged it to make a likeness of the photo and rephotographed the dust as you see it here. It is a photo, a drawing and a material trace connected to the original sculpture and it retains a strong material quality of its own

Alex Rizkalla Remains/Vestiges: dispersal 1993

These objects were collected from his father’s house after a fire and made into an installation. After the installation he put all the elements into these boxes and dispersed the memories that the objects embodied for him. Rizkalla however remains an inveterate collector of objects and images that may later become part of a cabinet of curiosities.

Rachel Whiteread Untitled (Elongated plinths) 1998

The forms here are derived from an architectural dado cast as the negative of the wall feature and elongated to make these sarcophagi or mortuary slabs. They form a trace or memory of the absent wall. Whiteread’s objects invariably take the form of negative molds cast from real spaces and objects invoking the idea of memory through a trace of their absence. These negative forms have included a complete house and a synagogue.

Bethan Huws Boat 1983

These folded reed boats are the kind of thing you might do while mediating on a changing landscape. The wood grain suggests a lake. This is about imagining being in a landscape not a pictorial representation of one.

Robert MacPherson - 20 Frog Poems: Distant Thunder (A Memorial) for D.M. 1987-1989

MacPherson’s poetic ‘sound work’ invokes through its title and its forms the imagined buzzing of the bees - the breeping of the frogs and the rain on the tin roof that are evocative for most Australians. The latin names of tree frogs are written on rainforest timber panels from Macpherson’s native Queensland. The beehives may look like Donald Judd minimal cubes but they also evoke the colonial buildings of Northern Queensland with their tin roofs that thunder under the regular tropical downpour.

Haim Steinbach Untitled (graters, Victorian iron banks) 1990

Steinbach’s temporal poem is subtler. The rhythm of graters grating contrasts with the rhythm of the money box accumulating in spite of the formal similarities between the objects. The shelf is an elegant Minimalist sculpture that acts as a stage on which the actors, money banks and cheese graters meet and perform.

Fiona Hall Cash Crop, 1998, 170.0 x 132.0 x 60.0cm approx overall

Hall’s often use found objects and materials but always entail a great deal of historical and socio-political research. Soap here is used as a medium to describe fruits as trade items in the colonial context of our region.

Mark Dion Cabinet for NSW 2008.

Mark sends me 10 parcels a year for 10 years. He indicates by a code on the wrapping where they are to be placed on the shelves. They are sent from all over the world as he travels widely in his work as an artist. The objects inside are often mementos or gift items as tokens of the place they were found but we are never to know exactly what they are except by the customs label description. It is a sort of diary tracing his life and work. There are already many more parcels than appear in this photo.

Sigmar Polke ‘Meteor II’ 1988

In the 1970s Polke abandoned painting as he travelled in Asia and Africa mainly using photography. He developed a technique of allowing the photo chemicals to stain and create “emanations” on the prints. When he returned to painting in the 1980s he transferred this technique to paint. Here stains of metallic paint on the reverse show through the transparent canvas that also reveals the complex structure of the stretcher bars emphasising process and matter over image.

Dieter Roth Spice window 1971

In the late 1960s Roth began a series of works made from food that reformed as they decayed or were consumed by insects. The olfactory quality was important to Roth in choosing his materials. Spice window is such a piece although the aroma naturally diminishes with time and the spice is enclosed in a fairly air-tight window frame. Insects have lived in the layers of coloured spice drawing delicate trails through the material and leaving their cases on its surface.

Anish Kapoor - Void field 1992

Kapoor pays homage to Yves Klein in his void sculptures. This incredibly dense ancient rock has been hollowed out leaving a black hole on the surface. There are no apparent sides to the holes and there is no visible end to the space. The hollow has been lined with a dark blue pigment to give spatial depth to the darkness.

Svetlana Kopystiansky The Trainer 1992

The gymnasium and the library come together in a parable about healthy minds and bodies in the old Soviet Union. The book cases hint at authoritarian architecture and the books open to our gaze remain obscure as the spines are facing away from us. A masquerade of openness in a closed society.

Igor and Svetlana Kopystiansky - Incidents 1996-1997 in this film objects moved by the wind on the lower east side of NY seem to come alive and dance together. This is achieved by careful editing from days of shooting, there is no other manipulation of the image it is at once tender and funny.

Nike Savvas Atomic: full of love, full of wonder 2005

These coloured ping pong balls vibrate or dance in the wind from two large fans shimmering like super heated air over the desert or particles in an accelerator.

Matt Collishaw Waterfall 2000

Video in upright mirror Includes bubbling water in the mirror on the floor. At one level this work playfully emulates conceptual art’s questioning of modes of representation and the real which we will see later in Joseph Kosuth’s Three and one table .

Body as subject

Materials and objects that trigger embodied memory

In the light of recent neurobiological research we know that 98% of the activity of the mind takes place prior to consciousness kicking in. We also know that memory exists in a diffused way throughout the body and is activated by sensations received from the material world. This partly explains the power of material objects to trigger strong associations and memories.

It is a way of structuring memory that greatly enhances affect. This is yet another effect of ‘ontological communion’ in art which is particularly apt when dealing with the body as subject.

Doris Salcedo - Atrabiliarios 1992-1997

The body artist par excellence, Salcedo invokes both the idea of bodily memory and creates actual memorials to the disappeared of Colombia. Niches have been cut into the plaster wall containing shoes as relics or traces of lost people. The niches have been sealed with a membrane of animal caul which is literally sutured into the plaster of the wall.

Doris Salcedo Untitled 2007

Clothes of the missing sealed into the furniture they left behind with loved ones that became monstrous reminders of their absence. The strategy of disappearing people rather than killing them outright is to silence a community in the context of the drug wars in Colombia.

Maria Elvira Escallón Desde Adentro 2003

This one of a series of photos of a building made by Escallon after a terrorist bombing, the traces of people feeling their way in the dark trying to escape have been captured and presented at life size so we stand in a direct relation to these people before the photo.

Oscar Munoz Biografias 2002

Videos of faces created in coal dust on water. The completely recognisable portraits are made as silk screen images and the dust is forced through the screen to create the image on the water. The video is projected onto a white board on the floor that has a drain hole in it and the sound of water going down is played by a small speaker under the plug. The water is seen to slowly go down the drain and the image first starts to distort then disappears down the hole. Another memorial to the disappeared.

Monica Tikachek 219 2007

This artist’s performances and filmed actions intensify our experience of the body and its vulnerability. Unlike Mike Parr whose “realist” work we will see in a minute her work exploits strange narratives and mythologies or fairy stories.

William Kentridge Tide Table video projection

This animation is an exemplary case of medium specificity. In describing living with Apartheid and its aftermath Kentridge makes his films by drawing then erasing the image in a process that mimics the necessity of amnesia and erasure required to accept the premise underlying the system. The process can be witnessed in the unfolding images as the trace of the artists' hand moves across the page.

Ernesto Neto - Just like drops in time, nothing 2002

The stretched lycra not only bulges like flesh but inevitably has associations with underwear.

Jannis Kounellis Untitled 1984-87

The lighted flame at the left of this work transforms matter into energy and suggests the alchemical transformation of matter into spirit. The bed is the site of birth, of dreaming, of conception and death and is configured to the human body. The materials on the adjacent shelves are fragments from a house and blankets from a bed and a steel beam. The black square suggests Malevich again and visions of the void or infinity. The rows of soot recall the cemeteries in the artist’s native Piraeus where lamps are lit to symbolise the transition of the souls of the departed. So this work describes a journey from pre-birth of the soul through material life to its final return to the infinite void.

Rebecca Horn - Thermometre d'Armour 1988 Finger glove performance 1972

All Horn’s works are allegories of the body and its extensions. Her performances and kinetic instruments all feel out the space around them literally exploring the limits of perception through the body.

Rebecca Horn - Pendulum and emu egg 1987

The pendulum suddenly descends - violently threatening the feminine potential of the egg then slowing down to a gentle caress.

Mike Parr Wax Bride AGNSW 1998

Like Duchamp the collected works constitute a whole. In effect his life story is his art. His play with the bride image is of course a direct reference to Duchamp’s bride.

Mike Parr - Bronze Liars (Minus 1 to 16) 1996

Parr is at heart a performance artist with a strong realist strand but in the 1980s he began making self-portraits that were in a way an extension of the body actions of the 1970s. These bronzes are also self-portraits deliberately done without looking. Parr by now knows how to make exact portraits but he wants chance to play a part and to disrupt the image. The metal heads suggest cold logic in spite of the distortions while the bees wax bases or bodies suggest warm organic matter just as it does for Beuys.

Anselm Kiefer Women of Antiquity: Candida, Hypatia, Myrtis, 2002 AGNSW

Kiefer has made several series of works that recall the repression of strong women in antiquity.

The attributes that sit in place of these women’s heads place them in history. The book is for Myrtis a poet who competed with the male poet Pindar and was punished for her presumption.

The melancholia cube belongs to Hypatia an Alexandrian sophist philosopher who was stoned to death by Christian monks for her teaching. The razor wire is Candida’s she was a Roman witch who reputedly ran naked in the forests with snakes threaded through her hair. A Dionysian herbalist in all probability

Simone Mangos - Salt lick 1986

In this early work Mangos exploits the material and chemical characteristics of materials to suggest the revenge of the virgin, the vestal block they have speared will consume these masculine iron spikes.

Narelle Jubelin The unforseen 1989

Jubelin has altered a colonial mirror frame exploiting its eye shape. The white of the eye painted laboriously with nail polish suggesting the female dressing up and the iris rendered in petit point embroidery. At the heart of this ensemble is the image of colonial male explorers about to enter a cave in the Blue Mountains, the cave of course is shaped like a vagina, another case of tables turned and an echo of Kapoor’s voids.

Hilarie Mais Grid doors II 1987

This apparently abstract configuration has built into it varying depths and a shadow thrown on the wall that creates the impression of a figure trapped within.

Richard Deacon - Listening to reason 1986

The title here leads us to see the strange twisting loops of timber as ears. Maybe suggesting five heads around the conference table. Like Mais he comes from a formalist schooling but his work is often playful and embraces bodily connotations unlike the Minimalists. The wood has been laminated over a jig form in sections and the final configuration was a response to what he had made as fragments in the studio rather than a determined overall plan. Five ear shapes and five twisted straight pieces came together to make this complex and baffling form

Ron Mueck Untitled (Old woman in bed) 2000-2002

At the opposite extreme from Mais and Deacon Mueck has made a hyper real figure except that it is strangely smaller than life size. The intense detail of skin and hair transcends life like and becomes a haunting memory of a person we might once have loved.

Hans Bellmer - La demie poupée 1972

This is a late work by the surrealist Bellmer. These dolls were often arranged in domestic environments to be photographed in unusual poses.

Patricia Piccinini The comforter 2010

Piccinini has these grotesque distortions of the body made up by an expert modeller made from her precise drawings. Her intention is to normalise difference and to introduce sympathy or even empathy for the odd creations rather than seeking to disturb.

Tactility and the body in two dimensional works

While much of what has been covered in the reference to the body has been sculptural tactile images of the body also appear in two dimensions for example G&G, Bacon, Clemente, Guston.

Gilbert and George - Reaming 1982

G&G are making a kind of contemporary history painting. Their subject matter is drawn from the streets of London but the youths they feature take on the mantle of the heroic male model of European traditions. They confront the sexual issues of their world in public when these subjects are usually private acts and seldom spoken off except as scandal.

Francesco Clemente - Water and wine 1981

Clemente explores a more intimate personal and often dreamlike imagery influenced by places where he lives including India and Italy He is concerned about humankind’s separation from nature and sees the ubiquitous sacred cow of India as a symbol of the time before the expulsion. The ritual slaughter refers back to the healing power of the sacramental blood of Christ and the meaning of transubstantiation in art.

Francis Bacon Study for a self portrait 1979

Bacon calls himself a realist and strives to make the paint that he smears, or applies with textured cloth and mixes with sand or dust. These strategies are intended to bring the sensation of the thing onto the nervous system of the viewer. The most important thing about Bacon is not the image but the texture and the method of its making that leaves a trace of the artist and his studio firmly in the materiality of the canvas. In the Francis Bacon Five decades catalogue at AGNSW 2012-13 I emphasised this aspect of his work and it also appears in more detail in Craft Arts International in the publications page of this website.

Philip Guston East Tenth St 1977

Guston reverted to figuration after years of abstract painting. The brushwork he evolved in abstract painting becomes thicker and more urgent when he deals with the body and with the world close to him. There is a strange affinity between this scraping and smearing in Bacon and Guston but it also reminds me of the scrabbling of the work of Rebecca Horn struggling to make a mark on the world while also trying to find its limits.

CONCEPTUAL ART /PHENOMENOLOGY/POSTMODERN CRITIQUE OF REPRESENTATION

• Another way of considering the boundary of matter and consciousness appears in the guise of conceptual art. • Paying attention to phenomena and meditating on the nature of being in the world. • Critiques of representation in conceptual and Postmodern art.

Joseph Kosuth One and Three Tables 1965

Joseph Kosuth was a founder member of the Conceptual art movement in America. He was also associated with Art and Language in the sixties when the late Australian artist Ian Burn was an active member. Here he puts before us three forms of representation each with its own limitations even the thing itself in Platonic terms is a shadow of the ideal form ”table”.

Ian Burn - No object implies the existence of any other 1967

No object implies the existence of any other1967 is one of Burns most poignant works of conceptual art. The words of the title are carefully printed in white onto the glass of the vernacular bathroom mirror. The title refers to a concept that was used in the sixties to assert the abstract autonomy of art, Ian told me he read it in Robbe Grillet however it was first coined in ‘A Treatise of Human Nature’, 1739 by David Hume. However in this work as it is written on the mirror the object in front of us literally implies the existence of everything before it including the viewer. Burn had a delicious sense of irony and this work not only decisively rebuts the Greenbergian mantra of autonomous art works but also does so with great wit.

Art & Language Secret painting 1967-1968

Burn was a founder member of Art & Language, in this work he collaborated with Mel Ramsden the text tells us that there is a painting forever hidden from view under the black monochrome. This recalls Duchamp’s infamous ball of string with an object hidden inside and sealed between two metal plates. In both cases the viewer is asked to imagine.

Giulio Paolini L’altra figura 1984 Perejaume Marc a l'encesa 1990

Here are two European essays in the impossibility of representation. Both could be seen as related to Ian Burn. Perejaume’s burnt frame comments on the nature of landscape that evades framing and Paolini melancholically mourns the end of the modernist search for the essence.

Lawrence Wiener (This and that) put (here and there) out of sight of Polaris 1990

Like Kosuth Wiener explores language in the world contriving meaning by specific placement. His works are often site related and always immaculate formally. Commissioned for the biennale in 1990 this work humorously describes both a southern hemisphere biennale and our international collection. It can also of course be an oblique reference to the absence of American Polaris nuclear submarines in the southern hemisphere.

Conceptual art also appears in some form in much of the best contemporary painting

Gerhard Richter Abstract painting (812) 1994 Ema 1992

Richter paints as if he was seeing through a camera view finder, the loss of focus; the blurring and movement of the lens are all translated into paint whether he is painting figures or abstracts. He brings our attention finally back to the way we see. His paintings are a conceptual examination of the phenomenology of paint and the function of eye.

John Nixon Black and orange cross 19092

Nixon deliberately uses the basest of materials, sheets of unprepared Masonite and rolled on house paint. The poor materials reference Arte Povera. The formal and optical effects of the black and orange cross are as precise as any work by Ellsworth Kelly in spite of the apparently off hand treatment.

Identity, Gender and Environment become common topics for conceptual artists

Imants Tillers Pataphysical man 1984

Tillers’ early work was often a reference to Marcel Duchamp but by the 1980s he was looking at De Chirico whose anti-modernist rhetoric was widely appropriated by the post-modern generation. This painting incorporates de Chirico’s appropriation of classical antiquity and Tillers adds images from children’s tales from his native Latvia. He has also incorporated Aboriginal hand prints into the mélange. Later in his career Tillers began appropriating NZ painter Colin McCahon but came to see these as homages rather than as critical appropriation.

Lindy Lee This too is heroic 1988

Like Tillers, Lee started making ‘post modern’ quotations from art history but always held process as a central purpose in art making. In time any element of critical distance or irony gave way to a celebration of attention to making and to seeing.

Brenda Croft and Adrian Piper Conference Call 1992

This work was originally a collaboration by two activist women of colour that I commissioned for Boundary Rider the 9th Biennale of Sydney. Piper wanted images of aboriginal people to accompany an installation in which visitors could sit in chairs facing the images and listen on the desk phones by each chair to indigenous people patiently instructing them in Aboriginal dialects. Croft’s photographs of friends from Redfern in Sydney perfectly met her requirements and it became a substantial collaboration that later travelled to Africa, England and S. America.

Janet Laurence The memory of nature 2010

Laurence uses plants and found organic substances to describe the impact of society on the environment including the loss of species and suggests possible remedies.

Susan Norrie Undertow 1999?

This multi media multi projection piece imagines a world hopelessly polluted and suffering the ravages of climate change. Although savage about the loss of habitat her images are strangely beautiful.

Performance Art as documentation in video and as portfolios of photographs

The collection includes many examples of such documentation and a section dealing with this will be added as soon as possible but searching the AGNSW site for the following artists will give a good overview.

Mike Parr Marina Abramobvic Vito Acconci Rudolf Schwarzkogler Paul McCarthy Ana Mendieta Joseph Beuys